Researchers claim to have found that the 'perfect nose' points upwards, just
as the UK's nose job season gets into full swing. Radhika Sanghani reports

As teenagers, my girlfriends and I were all very conscious of our noses. We all cared about the way we looked and we wanted to be beautiful. We defined beauty from the way our favourite actresses, singers and models looked. It didn’t take long for us to realise that having a straight, small, slightly upturned nose was integral to being beautiful.

If you didn’t have that perfect nose, you had two choices: either accept your large, non-perfect nose and pray that the Roman look comes back into fashion ASAP, or get plastic surgery.

I opted for the first choice but many of my girl friends had nose jobs, or rhinoplasty, as it’s medically known. They all reached a point where the way their noses looked was making them so miserable that their parents eventually agreed to help them out. For some, it wasn’t a financial strain, but for others, it meant a few years of the family saving up for the procedure, which can cost between £3,000 - £7,135 depending on the surgeon.

The study, which showed 106 people photographs of young, white women with varying nose angles, found that 106 degrees was considered to be the most feminine and “aesthetic” for a nose. Dr Omar Ahmed, of New York University, the lead author of the study, sounds thrilled to have found out what we constitute as beauty.

Too much pressure

I’m less thrilled. Young women and girls already face so many body image pressures on how they ‘should’ look, and this just doesn’t help. It turns women’s bodies into separate parts, and automatically makes every woman who doesn’t have a 106 degree angle nose – let alone one that faces downwards, dear god – feel as though her nose is very un-perfect.

Rebecca Adlington has said she's been bullied about her nose

The study promotes a dangerous mindset which ignores the fact that beauty is not just about angles – it’s about a person’s smile, laugh, personality and everything else. Ultimately, this study just turns the nose into another unattainable body part for young women, along with the'thigh gap', flat stomachs and perky breasts.

But it’s especially worrying considering that we know young women are so bothered by their noses that they’re increasingly having rhinoplasty to help with their confidence levels.

Official statistics show that last year 3,841 women had rhinoplasty which was a 19 per cent rise from the year before. They don’t show an age breakdown, but Charles East, a consultant surgeon in facial plastic surgery and a member of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, tells me he sees about 20 teenage girls a week wanting nose jobs.

More teens than ever

Scarlett Johansson's nose looks like it has a 106 degree angle

“It’s the most common operation among teenagers and it’s increasing,” he says. “There’s that age group where their parents have the means to pay for it before they go to college, or start a new job. At this time of year the office is full of parents saying, she’s finished her A-levels now so we want to get this done.”

His clients are either young girls who have support from their parents, acknowledging their daughter’s misery and just want her to be happy, or older women who have waited to establish themselves financially before changing the noses they’ve hated for a long time. The general trend for all women now is to have a subtle refinement, such as getting rid of the bump and refining the tip, to look “nice and natural”.

He tells me there are even racial preferences – which is something that Dr Ahmed’s study ignores by only focusing on Caucasian women – for noses. Chinese people typically want a "nasal bridge built" while "the white Anglo Saxons don’t like the bump and want a more feminine profile".

"People with a more Mediterranean look with a broad nose want a smaller nose with a more refined tip," Mr East explains.

With young girls who come to him, he tells me they don’t like their faces when they look in the mirror and many hate having their photo taken. I remember this from my school days, where we larger-nosed girls had an automatic fear of side-profile photos.

Selfie panics

Miley Cyrus taking a selfie

We’d spend hours de-tagging them from Facebook, which fits in with a recent study from the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, which found one in three facial plastic surgeons saw an increase last year in patients who were more self aware about their looks because of selfies and social media.

When you’re photographing your face on a daily basis, you do start to notice that your Instagrammed selfie doesn’t look like Cara Delevingne’s because your nose is twice the size, and for a lot of girls that does create serious anxiety. We’ve moved away from a world where women are only shown beauty standards in magazines and movies – in this digital age you can see unattainable, photoshopped women everywhere you look.

It means that young women are facing more pressures than ever before. When you add 'scientific studies' claiming that there is such a thing as a ‘perfect nose’ to those pressures, it’s seriously disconcerting. Most teenagers trust science, and if they see a study showing that 106 degrees is the must-have for a nose, those with lower self-esteem may start to want surgery.

There’s obviously nothing wrong with people having nose jobs if that’s really what they want, but if they’re being pressured into having them, then that is a problem. Young women don’t need to be told they should look a certain way – especially one that ignores every race other than Caucasians – because for most of us, that’s impossible. This new photo project proves just how different perceptions of beauty around the world really are.

Instead, we all need to be reminded that it doesn’t really matter what angle your nose is from your face, so long as it does its job and lets you breathe. And that, above all, 'perfect' is a fiction constructed by savvy plastic surgeons on the hunt for work.